A wise man who lived on the top of a large mountain once said: "Don't translate jokes. Translated jokes suck ass.". Since many people have climbed that mountain to seek his advice it must be correct. Hundred people who climb mountains to seek advice from some weird old guy can't be wrong, can they?

Dave Barr [artsearch-corporate.com] has been there, done that [si.edu],years ago. He placed four marble tetrahedra [umich.edu] at points on the globe (New Guinea, South Africa, Greenland and Easter Island) so that they describe a giant tetrahedron inside the earth itself.

Their final experiment involved dropping a vertically-held slice of bread from the roof of their building. This is a great set-up--if you routinely eat your breakfast toast on the roof of a warehouse.

Strangely, they actually built the perfect apparatus for testing Murphy's Law, if memory serves designed by Adam, but for some reason didn't use it for the final test. This set-up involved the slice of bread on a table top, pushed slowly over the edge until it was far enough off to tumble down.

Scientific American had an in depth article on Murphy's Law about 7 years ago. It was basically proved the toast-landing-butter-side-down phenomenon was tied to the fundamental constants of the universe, and for any bipedal species evolving on any planet, toast will always tend to land top-side down. The only way around it is to butter the bottom of your toast.

Toast falling butter-side-down only applies (in the case of that study, can't find the original article) if the toast teeters on the edge before falling. If you do happen to see toast about to fall, and can't catch it in time, consider giving it a healthy whack across the room. This changes the proportion between the rotational speed and the vertical speed, making it more random as to whether or not it falls butter side down.

If you do happen to see toast about to fall, and can't catch it in time, consider giving it a healthy whack across the room. This changes the proportion between the rotational speed and the vertical speed, making it more random as to whether or not it falls butter side down.

And, I would imagine, more likely to splat up against the wall, butter side in.

Don't even talk - I went and pinpointed my house. Apparently if I tunnled straight through the Earth, I'd end up about a thousand kilometers off the southwest coast of Australia. Well, if I don't melt or get gravitated into a tiny little ball of pain.

I suppose this would be a great way to find out where to go to get as far as possible from the in-laws/parents/ex/other.

Gravity doesn't work that way. If you were at the center of the earth and "somehow" it wasn't lethally hot and full of solid iron, the net gravitational force on you would be zero because the mass of the earth would be evenly distributed around you. More generally, the surface of the earth is in fact the point where the force of the Earth's gravity is the strongest.

Saint Augustine (354-430) argued against people inhabiting the antipodes:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on t

It seems like you could call this a variation of geocaching [wikipedia.org]. Or maybe an international (and IMO cool weirdness) version of the Geological Society of America's earthcaching [earthcache.org], where the "unique geoscience feature" is the entire freakin' planet.

This map [zefrank.com] shows possible locations for land-based antipodal points, which have large areas of Greenland and some of Siberia overlapping Antarctica, as well as the more reachable Argentina/Chile with China pairings. There are also some northern South America with Phillipines and other island areas possibilities. But it is no surprise that the NZ/Spain pairing was the first realized, as those are both close to reasonable cities that are likely home for people who visit his page.

In the 70s, I had thought the China Syndrome could really happen. Jack Lemmon spouting off that our nuclear power plant would melt through the earth into the Indian Ocean just does not cut it. I want my 4 bucks back. The Indian Ocean Syndrome. Bah.

PS: First person that corrects me by saying he corrected himself by saying it would only melt to the center gets a slap. It was the name of the freaking movie for fsck sake.

.. we need someone to drop a piece of bread on the dark side of the moon.. and figure out the exact opposite side of the earth from that point at a certain point in time...
That would really make it a sandwich. It's not a decent sandwich unless you've got at least two things between the bread.
Of course it would be a very short-lived sandwich.. unless you kept moving the earth-bread to stay in alignment with the position of the moon as it passed.
ze rules.

The story is misleading. I feel like the submitter does not know what GeoRSS is [georss.org]. Which reminds me, there has never been any story on slashdot regarding GeoRSS at all, which surprises me (and yes, I did submit some but they all got refused:-)

The first place to start is on georss.org, but you can also read the buzzy OGC press release [opengeospatial.org]. From which you'll learn: "A number of organizations have already implemented GeoRSS in open source and commercial mapping, blogging and other software products. Yahoo and Microsoft have expressed interest. Raj Singh, Director of OGC's Interoperability Programs and one of the original team that created GeoRSS explains why, "We designed GeoRSS to be easily implemented in software. Once GeoRSS is part of an application, it allows just about anyone to point a GeoRSS enabled feed at GeoRSS enabled software and instantly make a map.""

But this doesn't tell you what GeoRSS is and why the story's summary is misleading. You can read this article about GeoRSS and read more about the georss standard woes here [slashgeo.org].

GeoRSS is geospatially-aware RSS. There is a lot of applications, see the links above, like geotagging news items or sensors or podcasts or... I haven't seen any georss in the links above, only mashups and funny pictures. (maybe I should look harder?:-)

On the other hand, I'm now struck by the notion that I'll emerge at the ruins at Machu Pichu if I take up digging as a serious hobby. (I'm in South East Asia). Then again, perhaps not as fantastic as it sounds if the Nazca lines turn out to be ancient markings for a planet-size kebab.

I'm going to be the first Earth sandwich maker in the USA by visiting "French Southern and Antarctic Lands", and Northern Montana. Looking for sponsors for this important trip. Please send money (cash only).

I'm well aware that there are numerous governments on Earth. The vast majority of which care a great deal to be accurate on the globe we call Earth. If you are a reasonably proficient English speaker or from a nation that has the technical capacity to reach the SlashDot website there is a very high likelihood that your government (singular) is one of the governments (plural) that is very very concerned with being highly precise when placing things on the Earth. If you are from any other nation that build

Longitude and latitude doesn't necessarily assume that the Earth is a sphere. It does however, assume that the Earth is symmetric about the equator (which is a better assumption). So corresponding lat and long coordinates will still work for a spheroid in that a line connecting the two points will pass through the center of the earth. However, the surfaces at those points won't necessarily be perpendicular to the line.

Not true: there are actually several types of latitude and longitude. The most common type (used by most maps) is Geodetic latitude and longitude [wikipedia.org], which does take into account the oblate [wikipedia.org] shape of the Earth.
What you are talking about would be geocentric latitude and longitude; in reality pretty much everybody prefers and uses geodetic.

There are a lot of interesting problems in the area of defining coordinate systems for maps and navigation. Reading about WGS84 [wikipedia.org] would be a good place to start learning more.

I'd be curious to see just what percentage of time being on land on one side places you in the ocean on the other. It'd seem like 2/3 of the time would be a good estimate, but looking at the distribution of land I think that's probably quite a bit off.Sorry if that got covered in the article, I didn't get a chance to read it all over yet.

Good show, worth watching, but 2-ch (the forum that the show is based on) isn't like slashdot. 2-ch is like yahoo groups... it's non-technical and is 40% ASCII (erm EUC_JP) art, 50% slang, and 10% "insight". Slashdot is 50% flamebait and 50% insight, generally. (Slashdot.jp is even better. The only flamebait I've ever seen is one I posted:) Damn Americans muck everything up...:)But anyway, here's the original 2-ch thread that inspired Densha Otoko: